Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Between Callisto and Ganymede, we hit something: a drifting cloud of fine particles, a belt of granular material stretched so thin it never appeared on the LGD, before or after. Cathie later called it a cosmic dust cloud. Bender thought it an unformed moon. It didn’t matter: whatever it was, the mission plowed into it at almost 50,000 kilometers per hour. Alarms clattered and red lamps blinked on.

During those first moments, I thought the ship was going to come apart. Herman was thrown across a bank of consoles and through an open hatch. I couldn’t see Cathie, but a quick burst of profanity came from her direction. Things were being ripped off the hull. Deep within her bulkheads, Greenswallow sighed. The lights dipped, came back, and went out. Emergency lamps cut in, and something hammered the side of the ship. More alarms howled, and I waited for the klaxon which would warn of a holing, and which would consequently be the last sound I could expect to hear in this life.

The sudden deceleration snapped my head back on the pads. (The collision had occurred at the worst possible time: Greenswallow was caught in the middle of an attitude alignment. We were flying backward.)

The exterior monitors were blank: that meant the cameras were gone.

Cathie’s voice: “Rob, you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see Herman?”

My angle was bad, and I was pinned in my chair. “No. He’s back in cargo.”

“Is there any way you can close the hatch?”

“Herman’s in there,” I protested, thinking she’d misunderstood.

“If something tears a hole out back there, we’re all going to go. Keeping the door open won’t help him.”

I hesitated. Sealing up seemed to be the wrong thing to do. (Of course, the fact that the hatch had been open in the first place constituted a safety violation.) “It’s on your console,” I told her. “Hit the numerics on your upper right.”

“Which one?”

“Hit them all.” She was seated at the status board, and I could see a row of red lights: several other hatches were open. They should have closed automatically when the first alarms sounded.

We got hit again, this time in front. Greenswallow trembled, and loose pieces of metal rattled around inside the walls like broken teeth.

“Rob,” she said, “I don’t think it’s working.”

Our passage through the cloud lasted about three minutes.

When it was over, we hurried back to look at Herman. We were no longer rotating, and gravity had consequently dropped to zero. Selma, gasping, pale, his skin damp, was floating grotesquely over a pallet of ore-sample canisters. We got him to a couch and applied compresses. His eyes rolled shut, opened, closed again. “Hurts,” he said, gently fingering an area just off his sternum. “I think I’ve been chewed up a little.” He raised his head slightly. “What kind of shape are we in?”

I left Cathie with him. Then I restored power, put on a suit and went outside.

The hull was a disaster: antennas were down, housings scored, lenses shattered. The lander was gone, ripped from its web. The port cargo area had buckled, and an auxiliary hatch was sprung. On the bow, the magnetic dock was hammered into slag. Travel between the ships was going to be a little tougher.

Greenswallow looked as if she had been sandblasted. I scraped particles out of her jet nozzles, replaced cable, and bolted down mounts. I caught a glimpse of Amity’s lights, sliding diagonally across the sky. As were the constellations.

“Cathie,” I said. “I see Mac. But I think we’re tumbling.”

“Okay.”

Bender was also on board Amity . And, fortunately, Marj Aubuchon, our surgeon. Herman’s voice broke in, thick with effort. “Rob, we got no radio contact with anyone. Any sign of Victor?”

Ganymede was close enough that its craters lay exposed in harsh solar light. Halfway round the sky, the Pleiades glittered. Tolstoi’s green and red running lights should have been visible among, or near, the six silver stars. But the sky was empty. I stood a long time and looked, wondering how many other navigators on other oceans had sought lost friends in that constellation. What had they called it in antiquity? The rainy Pleiades…. “Only Amity ,” I said.

I tore out some cable and lobbed it in the general direction of Ganymede. Jupiter’s enormous arc was pushing above the maintenance pods, spraying October light across the wreckage. I improvised a couple of antennas, and replaced some black boxes. Then I needed to correct the tumble. If I could.

“Try it now,” I said.

Cathie acknowledged.

Two of the thrusters were useless. I went inside for spares and replaced the faulty units. While I was finishing up, Cathie came back in. “Rob,” she said, “radio’s working, more or less. We have no long-range transmit, though.”

“Okay. I’m not going to try to do anything about that right now.”

“Are you almost finished?”

“Why?”

“Something occurred to me. Maybe the cloud, whatever that damned thing was: maybe it’s U-shaped.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I needed something to worry about.”

“Maybe you should come back inside.”

“Soon as I can. How’s the patient doing?”

“Out,” she said. “He was a little delirious when he was talking to you. Anyhow, I’m worried: I think he’s got internal damage. He never got his color back, and he’s beginning to bring up blood. Rob, we need Marj.”

“You hear anything from Amity yet?”

“Just a carrier wave.” She did not mention Tolstoi . “How bad is it out there?”

From where I was tethered, about halfway back on the buckled beam, I could see a crack in the main plates that appeared to run the length of the port tube. I climbed out onto the exhaust assembly, and pointedmy flashlight into the combustion chamber. Something glittered where the reflection should have been subdued. I got in and looked: silicon. Sand and steel had fused in the white heat of passage. The exhaust was blocked.

Cathie came back on. “What about it, Rob?” she asked. “Any serious problems?”

“Cathie,” I said, “ Greenswallow’s going to Pluto.”

Herman thought I was Landolfi: he kept assuring me that everything was going to be okay. His pulse was weak and rapid, and he alternately sweated and shivered. Cathie got a blanket under him and buckled him down so he wouldn’t hurt himself. She bunched some pillows under his feet, and held a damp compress to his head.

“That’s not going to help much. Raising his legs, I mean.”

She looked at me, momentarily puzzled. “Oh,” she said. “Not enough gravity.”

I nodded.

“Oh, Rob.” Her eyes swept the cases and cannisters, all neatly tagged, silicates from Pasiphae, sulfur from Himalia, assorted carbon compounds from Callisto. We had evidence now that Io had formed elsewhere in the solar system, and been well along in middle age when it was captured. We’d all but eliminated the possibility that life existed in Jupiter’s atmosphere. We understood more about the mechanics of ring formation, and we had a new clue to the cause of terrestrial ice ages. And I could see that Cathie was thinking about trading lives to satisfy the curiosity of a few academics. “We don’t belong out here,” she said, softly. “Not in these primitive shells.”

I said nothing.

“I got a question for you,” she continued. “We’re not going to find Tolstoi , right?”

“Is that your question?”

“No. I wish it were. But the LGD can’t see them. That means they’re just not there.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she shook her head impatiently. “And we can’t steer this thing. Can Amity carry six people?”